Scientists discovered “super-Earth” planet, best candidate for life

In a space quest for next planet to live in for the future humanity, scientists have located an exoplanet that’s the best candidate for life as we know it.

Experts believed that it may prove to be an even more important target for the future characterization of planets in the habitable zone than Proxima b or TRAPPIST-1.

Scientists have named the newest exoplanet as super-Earth LHS 1140B, because it is quite larger than Earth.

For the past decades, our scientists have been discovered thousands of alien planet also called as exoplanet.

LHS 1140B is an exoplanet orbiting a red dwarf star 40 light-years from Earth—what the international team of astronomers who discovered it have deemed a “super-Earth.”

Utilizing ESO’s HARPS instrument and a range of telescopes around the world, the astronomers located the exoplanet orbiting the dim star – LHS 1140 – within its habitable zone.

This newly found world passes in front of its parent stars as it orbits, has likely retained most of its atmosphere, and is a little larger and much more massive than the Earth.

The discovery truly brought excitement for Astronomers observing the space, super-Earth LHS 1140b is among the most exciting known subjects for atmospheric studies.

Although the faint red dwarf star LHS 1140b is ten times closer to its star than the Earth is to the Sun, because red dwarfs are much smaller and cooler than the Sun is, the super-Earth lies in the middle of the habitable zone and receives around half as much sunlight from its star as the Earth does.

The newest discovered exoplanet has bring excitement for experts as they called as different from other planet they’ve seen in the past decades.

“This is the most exciting exoplanet I’ve seen in the past decade,” says lead author Jason Dittmann of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics said.

Dittmann also said in an ESO science release that LHS 1140b would be a good subject for space quests in science.

“We could hardly hope for a better target to perform one of the biggest quests in science — searching for evidence of life beyond Earth,” he noted.

According to astronomers, in order to support life as we know it, a planet must retain an atmosphere and have liquid surface water.

When red dwarf stars are young, they emit radiation that can damage the atmospheres of planets around them.

They also noted that exoplanet’s large size indicates that a magma ocean may have existed on its surface for eons, feeding steam into the atmosphere and replenishing the planet with water until well within the time the star had cooled to its current, steady glow.

The astronomers estimate the planet is at least five billion years old, and deduce that it has a diameter of almost 18,000 kilometers (11,185 mi)— 1.4 times larger than that of the Earth. Its greater mass and density implies that it is probably made of rock with a dense iron core.